Early on, i accepted as fact that if i had any hope for a creative life, i’d either have to take orders about what i create, or buy back my life. The dissonance of having to buy freedom came as a shock, for i was born into a patriotic household which held the american dream in high esteem. The corporate overthrow of my nation was still in the shadows and living under rocks with grubs and bacteria. Initially, i believed in the sanctity of art and the honesty of literature - that the world of ideas was a temple within which the best of humanity was forged. My formative years coincided with the period of abundance just after WWII when the corporate tax rate was 90%, the nation`s interstate highways were built and the educational system was the envy of the world. However like some bad movie arc, my efforts to market my creative product coincided with the bumper sticker that read “he who dies with the most toys wins;” whoever printed that 1st batch is probably still living off the proceeds, or bankrupted by greed - and we all know what bankruptcy can accomplish if you turn to politics. Undeterred, i continued with my objective to carve stone until i was very old, because it gave me pleasure. It was not a straight line, as i was young and my ambition a very complex equation - at the time, i had no idea how complex. I sought the aid of an expert by returning to school. I had met my first stone carving instructor during a vision quest in New York City - it was s magical time when all things were possible. He was old school, 90 years of old school. Of the many things he taught me, carving without power tools was the most practical for reasons too vast to enumerate here. This wisdom, however, ran full up against the expert’s advice - command would be more accurate.
The expert was a fine man, but his strength was as a mason, whereas my first instructor was an artist. Nor do i regret my time working with power tools or peering into the workings of the art market from the inside out - it is ego filled. I had always been aware of that unsavory aspect of the process, but dismissed the manifestations as a crutch of the dilettante. Returning to school was rationalized surrender and the first step in my downfall, for now rather than owning the good fortune which comes from finding an activity you really love, i was willing to trade sacraments (machine - profit vs hand - poverty) in order to crash the financial barrier - a Faustian bargain one might argue, and like all good bargains, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t - no amount of machine proficiency could mask my growing disdain for the trappings of art world success. It wasn’t long after this, i was strongly encouraged to find a trade more profitable - i’d be crazy not to. As a young buck, hormones drive the train and i was not then, probably not now, grounded enough to fully appreciate how hardwired the ability to provide is to that of the biological drive. Carving weekends worked for a while, but eventually the payments for a new van, food for the dogs, clothes for the child and entertainment for the wife required a 2nd and at times 3rd job. The silver lining for this cloud was the discipline of language; i’d always deferred where my father’s stock and trade was concerned, no doubt some oedipal tension there, but who’d have thought expressing oneself could be such fun¿
Upon graduation i fled aerospace where i’d been renting my grey matter to the weapons industry into teaching at a time when “no child left behind” was becoming the corporate trojan horse to our nation’s most sacred asset - the young mind. You might well imagine how suited i was to this environment - too much of a free thinker to assimilate into the Bohemian Rhapsody of fine art; too moral to design weapons of destruction; how was i ever going to grade one student against another¿ By this juncture all my failure as a successful human being manifested in box after box of mementos of former glory - scads of aerospace coffee cups emblazoned at the taxpayer expense, nameplates from prestigious assignments, pictures with notable people (nobody you’d know) and always the infernal toolbox full of carving tools. Now that i’d been summarily dismissed from every rationalized occupation i could, there was nothing left but surrender - commercial real estate. It hadn’t occurred to me that i could sink any lower, but like Bob Dylan said, “when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.” A 50 year old l’enfant terrible in a room full of trust-fund babies; a pre 9/11 cia operative looking for a better life; and a roster of egos that make the U.S. Chief Executive, what’s his name, look like Dr. Albert Schweitzer - what could go wrong¿ My last wife a sainted woman, had by this time reconciled me to the fact that if there are Sunday Painters, there damn sure could be sunday sculptors; she got her credit cards and i got religion.
Until the food i’d been using to repress the nagging suspicion of trouble-in-paradise ruptured my appendix just as wife #3 skipped out with her debts paid and her name conveniently on the deed after having recently refinanced Chez Joseph. Self respect is highly overrated, until you go from wife, home and a job to a vacuum. The meaning of everything becomes highlighted, much like the vividness of a flower petal after a near death experience. Nor does meaning from such events necessarily make more sense, however brilliant it may be. For example, even with all the insights from such an assault on one’s measured perspective - maturation i think they call it - i am continuing to pay storage on things. Along with the one or two tchotkes that survived a bitter searching of the heart are all the stone carvings - residue from days of faith and hope - 17, a prime number which about sums up the significance of a life’s work. The far more valuable thing locked away in storage, something which can never be taken from me is the certain knowledge of how little power we have over things. Our conceit that one item is anymore valuable than another comes from a hierarchy of value we barely even think about anymore. It is assumed that the things we love will benefit from our interest and the things we hate will be punished - this delusion of power robs us from the awareness of our insignificance within the universe . . .
. . . simultaneously blocking our vision of the awe in which we swim. Robin Williams, may you . r . i . p , described life as fleeting; i miss his gift for understatement. We as a population have never been as enslaved as we are today, not in the perverse history of our kind with all of its cruelty, nobility and contradiction have we been as subjugated as today. The equivalent would be the ancient gazelle hunt in the canyon using cunning and intellect to stampede the unwitting herd only to find instead of nimble gazelles running for your spear tips, are pissed off Water Bufallo who hijacked the thoroughfare of your canyon ambush because they know where the water is - through you. Chevrolet even named a car the Impala, and if you don’t think they were seducing your sense of adventure with that name, you never owned an Impala. The sad truth is modern transportation was best described in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” which for the life of me i cannot understand how that cartoon ever saw the light of day given Disney’s corporate ethos in these the latter days of our species. Objects are certainly capable of reflecting back to the viewer information, even emanating information to those tuned to that very low frequency, but as sentient creatures graced with feeling we have somehow come to forget that an inanimate object is unable to manifest the simple gurgle of any infant creature - panda, eagle, crocodile, or even human. We have become so numb to the magnificence of existence that in our hunger we seek it everywhere - the chain of consumption; the ceaseless din of media; the irrational wish to be understood by a computer without feelings; or blindness to that miserable hate you find in others, as your own.
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want - the sonnet
At six i’d like to've sung country music.
i’d seen a girl smiling at a singer.
Then a stingray bike i’d have liked to pick,
because the seat somehow fit you and her.
Once in a while, she was all i wanted,
seldom worked if she weren’t looking at you,
which can be enough, you wished you was dead.
thank g_d for woman - the better world’s hue.
Woman taught me well that i should not sing
for her but for my own understanding.
She let me to carry her books one spring,
“saying what love! but knowledge is more binding”
i know very little about women.
i do my best, as it is with most men.
jts 051717
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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